MBlume comments on How to come up with verbal probabilities - Less Wrong

24 Post author: jimmy 29 April 2009 08:35AM

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Comment author: MBlume 29 April 2009 11:06:59PM *  1 point [-]

so until then consider using a good browser instead

I'm curious, has anyone attempted to put a dollar amount to the developer time spent making things work in IE?

ETA: for Bayesian practice, I'll put my 98% bars at...$1000/yr and $200000000/yr

Comment author: mattnewport 29 April 2009 11:15:39PM 2 points [-]

Define wasted - I assume people generally put effort into making things work in IE because they expect to increase their audience as a direct result. For a profit making enterprise anyone investing time in making things work in IE is presumably doing so under the expectation that it will deliver a positive return. For a non-profit making enterprise the expectation is presumably that the increased audience is worth the expenditure based on whatever measure is used for the value of a larger audience.

Is your claim that people in fact consistently overestimate the return on investment for ensuring compatibility with IE? Or that relative to some hypothetical global optimum money is 'wasted'? If the latter, how would you attempt to evaluate the waste?

Comment author: MBlume 29 April 2009 11:18:44PM *  1 point [-]

I'm sorry, that was unclear.

What I intended by the word was simply that from an aggregate perspective, the optimal solution would be everyone, as matt said, using a good browser instead, which would require minimal effort by users, and make the time investment from developers unnecessary.

Still, I've edited to the more neutral spent.

ETA: I suppose if you wanted to put a dollar value to "time wasted", you would have to subtract off the dollar value of the time it would take for each present-day IE user to download Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome, etc, import any bookmarks, and become familiar with its workings up to the level at which they were previously proficient in IE. This amount is non-negligible, and I was wrong to overlook it, but I strongly doubt that it is of the same order as the developer-time spent.

Comment author: Alicorn 29 April 2009 11:12:07PM 2 points [-]

Does that include a dollar value assigned to volunteered coding time, or no?

Comment author: MBlume 29 April 2009 11:13:09PM 1 point [-]

Excellent question -- I'd include the dollar value of whatever work the individual could have been doing, yes.

Comment author: ciphergoth 02 May 2009 12:36:00PM 1 point [-]

I would assign much lower odds to the chances of it being less than $1000/yr worldwide, since I have personally done more than a day's work on it in the last 12 months and our daily chargeable rate is higher than that.